Facebook connect is the much talked about and ballyhooed software widget for websites and blogs which allows your users and readers to log in to their Facebook account and be able to see which of their Facebook friends are currently online on your site. Of course they can also invite their Facebook friends to join your site which is the real superpower of the software and the reason you'd want to take the time to get it up and running on your site. Just imagine the growth and viral possibilities for your site having easy one click button access to FB's 110 million users. This vast network could be at your fingertips very soon. Already two sites I've seen theinsider and CNN have integrated Facebook connect and I can only presume they've done so instead of Google's friend connect. There is a storm coming. Like when William B. Travis drew a line in the sand at the Alamo there is going to be an imaginary line drawn through the Internet "sand". On one side of this imaginary line you'll find Microsoft and their cohorts which currently include Facebook (who they've invested hundreds of millions in), CBS (who owns theinsider), CNN and the select other well-funded private investors who just invested in FB's latest three or 400 million round of financing raising which happened earlier this year. And the opponents on the other side of the imaginary line are Google and their cohorts. As you've probably heard if you spend any time on the Internet, Microsoft and Google are locked in a celebrity death match for full Internet supremacy. G's allies currently include MySpace who has come out in support of G's open social, along with propeller and a number of other sites who currently allow you to log in with your open ID, which is coincidentally enough based on open social. Ning is probably the biggest which has pledged to go with the Googler's open social. Clearly the two main players have been identified and now the scrum is going to be over the other major sites who have yet to decide which side they're on. Probably the most interesting (and the biggest site on the Internet right now) is Yahoo. And if you haven't been keeping up with the headlines this year I'll give you a quick recap on why they're the most interesting part of this battle. Early in the year around February March timeframe MSFT made a power-play and an offer to buy all of Yahoo for $33 a share which was quite a premium over their $17 per share price they closed that day at on the stock market. Unfortunately, for Microsoft and their executives in the Yahoo executives felt it was worth more than that... in the range of $40 per share which Microsoft was unwilling to go that high. The deal eventually failed due to this valuation stalemate. In response to shareholder outrage the Yahoo executives had to make a big stand and a big statement. Their solution was quite funny... to form a joint venture with their arch rival the one who had been kicking their ass in search which is of course Google. So from the outside Yahoo has ties to both sides of this major Web 3.0 Internet battle for social supremacy. What side they choose to fall on will have major fallout for the rest of the Internet. Also other big sites like eBay, Amazon, Craigslist, Hi5, Orkut, Friendster, Bebo, AOL, Propeller, Digg, Mixx, StumbleUpon, Youtube, DailyMotion, EzineArticles, Go2Articles and many other of the biggest sites will have to make a choice. There are advantages to becoming an early adopter but there are also drawbacks when the software has bugs which can anger users. The advantage to being an early adopter obviously is you get a jump on everyone else in your market and maybe just this opportunity alone can allow you to dominate your market and take users away who would have possibly joined with one of your competitors. My suggestion is to be an early adopter for your site because the software's that outstanding and allows serious growth for your website.
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